YouTube user ‘Nikolas Cruz’ said he wanted to go on a mass shooting in a 9-month-old comment

A user with the name ‘Nikolas Cruz’ – the name of the shooter who killed 17 people in a Florida high school on Wednesday – posted a comment under a documentary on a 1966 mass shooting, saying he wanted to do the same.

“I am going to what he did,” (sic) the now-deleted comment read. It was posted under a Discovery UK documentary about the 1966 Texas University shooting, in which a former marine shot dead 18 and injured over 30 others from atop the main building tower at the University of Texas at Austin.

The chilling comment came nine months before Wednesday’s Florida school shooting, with the suspect identified as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz. Seventeen people were killed and over a dozen injured.

Other students at the school, cited by various US media outlets, said Cruz had kept a stockpile of guns, and suggested the attack was carefully planned. Cruz reportedly triggered school fire alarms intentionally to get students and teachers to exit classrooms, maximizing the casualties.

It is not immediately clear whether the Nikolaz Cruz YouTube account, with nine subscribers and no publicly visible video uploads, belonged to the shooter, but it was suspended for “violent content” hours after the Florida shooting, apparently following the discovery of the comment.